Kelsey Thomson

Senior UX researcher at Bank of New Zealand

Wellington, New Zealand

Kelsey is a Senior UX Researcher at BNZ, focused on improving the online business banking experience. A lifelong curious learner who loves diving into the messy places, she enjoys helping product teams make better decisions through understanding people. Kelsey also co-organises the UX Meetup in Wellington, a passion that stems from the love of building communities and connecting people.

TALK

From theory to practice: what UX practitioners can learn from academic research methodology

UX research has grown organically with the rapidly expanding software industry. UX research methods have proven their worth in swiftly delivering insights that shape successful products, but what can we learn from more formal academic research practices? Practicing UX in a commercial environment means that there often isn’t time to apply rigorous academic research methodology. Concerns such as ensuring a large sample size or creating reproducible studies are often less important for business products due to fast delivery cycles and iterative approaches to design. However, there is still a lot of valuable knowledge to be gained from these research traditions that can enable us to make better product decisions. These academic practices can help us be more discerning in selecting methods, more rigorous in our analysis, and more selective with our experiments. This talk will be a curious gaze into how we might improve our research and make better product decisions by learning from hundreds of years of research in science.